The film, which opens with some special advance screenings in Los Angeles on Friday, explores the domestic life of one of Hollywood's most revered directors, set during the days of his struggle to put the ground-breaking 1960 classic, Psycho on the silver screen.

Mirren also enjoyed making the film and recalled rushing off to work each day: "I couldn't wait." And it helped that the actors have the same approach. "There's no mystery to it ... They talk about chemistry, and Helen agrees with me, there's no such thing. You know your part, she knows hers, and off you go, hope it works," Hopkins said.

The film deals with his on-set battles with censors and his cast including Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson, below left), Vera Miles (Jessica Biel) and Tony Perkins (James D'Arcy), and his strained relationship with Alma as she copes with his well-documented obsession with his ravishing leading ladies.

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But it paints a more nuanced and sympathetic portrait of the director Hopkins called "a damaged man" than the recent television film "The Girl," which dramatised Hitchcock's mean treatment of Tippi Hedren during filming of "The Birds."

"It's a great role," Mirren said of Alma, a film editor and assistant director in her own right. "So, you don't turn that down," she told Reuters. "I wanted to bring her out of the shadows."

Mirren, 67, and Hopkins, who is also being touted for an Oscar nomination, differed over how the director, who never won an Oscar during five decades of work, would have fared in the Hollywood of today.

"He would have despaired," Hopkins said. "It would have been anathema to him. That kind of artistry is gone."

Corporate control means "you have eight or nine producers on the set, everyone's got a say in the scripts, and even craft services!"

But Mirren differed, imagining "he'd do brilliantly well." "He was a great salesman, and the Hollywood of today is so much about being a salesman and being able to sell yourself as a brand," she explained. "He did that brilliantly. I think the two of them sold Hitch. Hitch was the faceman, he was the brand."

"Also," she added, "his filmmaking techniques would be incredibly successful," given the technological advances since Hitchcock's death in 1980.